Just made a coffee and watched the video. Interesting for sure but I myself am not sold on it in any way. The given information is full of holes but those issues are for another time.
I guess my ultimate take on ODBeleven is that for someone who wants to activate a few things on their own or a friends cars it looks great "on paper" for the price point, assuming you have an android device... but If you don't have an existing device then I look at the costs like this:
- £60 for the dongle
- £100 for a decent Android device
- £XX for credits / apps
Am not sure how much credits cost but taking the hardware costs in to account, and that you have a £22k+ car, take that £160 and find another £100 and buy VCDS
What I don't like is this use of what they call "apps". Aside from the fact that they have ripped this off from Vag Can Professional which uses them in a different way and for very different reasons actually, in the absence of Long Coding / a Long Coding Helper ability in ODBeleven you are kinda forced to use these "apps" for most of the things you might want to activate... and in doing so you are putting your trust in the hope that the person or the people who have written these "macro's" actually know what they are doing. Add that to the fact that you need to be "online" in order to action an app I believe, might be wrong... what happens if you loose your data connection?
The three biggest issues for me however are the following:
- There is zero, none, no way of taking a backup of your car for reference should anything go wrong.
- "App's" DO NOT register to a detailed change log.
- Some App's are not relevant / valid for and to the cars they are listed for.
Point 1 for me is a show stopper, our cars a complicated and highly configurable. This is just retarded, product should never have been released without a backup ability. Screen shots for coding is fine but no adaptation mapping is silly.
Point 2 I guess is kinda this way by design as if they did revel / log what an "app" did then you could record the steps and never need to buy credits for it again, or someone would post the steps online / share them and almost no one would buy credits unless they were just lazy. By not logging the steps of the app how can any issues be resolved using the tool? Might be kind of a moot point actually as it currently does not have long coding / a long coding helper, according to the chap on the video, which would be needed to resolve issues anyway lol.
Point 3 is just dangerous but is giving me a lot of work
It would seem that the developers believe, for example, that all MQB based cars are more or less the same (which is kinda true but not) and therefore they can apply all Golf MK7 mods to A3 8V's without issue. It does not really work that way. They also have not given the related descriptions enough detail including that prerequisite hardware might be needed and people are using credits to apply apps that will never work for them and in some cases contain errors in the coding and cause issues elsewhere in the car.
I guess with enough research in to other users experiences using ODBeleven to action tried and tested apps and codings, at the price point it could be a good tool for someone wanting to switch on a few things. For anything more I would pass on it.